Be Tolerable Or Be Angry? a Situation of Relationship Norm Conflict in Failure

While previous literature has agreed that friendships work well in mitigating consumer dissatisfaction in failures, this paper argues that a friendship may not always work. Drawing from the communal-exchange relationship framework (Clark and Mills 1979) and the psychological contract theory (Rousseau 1989), this paper suggests that communal (vs. exchange) consumers would be less dissatisfied in an implicit promise breach, but a reverse pattern would occur in an explicit promise breach. In addition, self-construal would moderate the interactive relationship between relationship type and promise breach type on consumer dissatisfaction. Two experiments with different consumption contexts provide convergent evidence of the hypotheses.